Holy Bedlock

“Who is this Hemingway person at all?”

“A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good.”

—Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

In the late 1920s Ernest Hemingway fulfilled his early promise and became one of the great stylistic innovators of the twentieth century. The crucial event of his teenage life – his wounding on the Italian front while serving with the Red Cross in July 1918 – inspired his dominant subject: “one form and another of killing” (314). He stated, with characteristic exaggeration, “bulls are the only animals bred to kill humans, a thing I always enjoyed doing myself and take an intelligent interest in” (143).

Many close friends (Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Gerald Murphy, and Max Perkins) went to the best Ivy League colleges. Like the great masculine writers (Joseph Conrad, André Malraux, and George Orwell), Hemingway learned from practical experience in the real world: from European wars and foreign reporting for the Toronto Star. As Herman Melville said, “A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard” (100). Scribner’s revved up their misleading publicity, and Hemingway tried to suppress the myths that he later encouraged: “At least one of the Croce di Guerra was given me by mistake and the citation mentions an action on Monte Maggio – transport of wounded under heavy bombardment – which I did not participate in – being 300 kilometers away in the hospital at the time” (212–13). He was aware of the dangers of megalomania, but knew that his swaggering Byronic persona (later imitated by Norman Mailer and other tough-guy writers) attracted many readers to his work.

The main personal events of 1926 to 1929 were the breakup of his marriage to Hadley Richardson, his affair with and marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer, the birth of his second son, Patrick, and the suicide of his father. The old newsman always wanted to hear the latest dope about his wide circle of friends, and their letters juiced him up for writing fiction. His correspondents tried to keep up with him as he constantly moved around, from Paris to the French Riviera, Austria, Switzerland, and Spain, with a short business trip to America, and then back to Paris. This perpetuum mobile, a kind of movable beast, could write anywhere.

The huge, handsome, and hedonistic Hemingway enjoyed life and made all his experiences seem attractive and exciting. The Sun Also Rises (1926) helped create the idealized, romantic image of Paris in the 1920s. The French welcomed the Americans who had saved them in the war. In the beautiful city, the centre of literary and artistic modernism, he was sexually and alcoholically liberated from American puritanism and Prohibition. For relief from writing, he played tennis and boxed, watched bike races and horse races. Rent, food, and drink were inexpensive, and, supported by his wives’ comfortable trust funds, he could live well on very little money and travel all over Europe. The Alps for John Ruskin meant spiritual grandeur; for Leslie Stephen, arduous ascents; for D.H. Lawrence, invigorating hikes; for Hemingway, skiing with no lifts and steep climbs. All expenses cost only $1.50 a day. In the summers he followed the bullfights around Spain. He loved the thrilling fiesta in Pamplona with “all that racing of the bulls through the streets and the people running ahead . . . amateurs being tossed, the bulls charging into the crowd. . . . The rush of people coming into the ring, coming faster and faster and then finally falling all over themselves, and piling up and the bulls jamming over them” (175). Hemingway’s fiction has inspired many young men to be trampled, gored, and even killed.

When he returned to the United States in 1928, Wyoming, the wildest country left in America, reminded him of Spain. His endless accounts of fishing in the Rockies and Key West are mind-numbing: “in the channel inside the atoll of the Key – I landed [a tarpon] weighing...